in it, such as Apollinaire and Cocteau. Still other artists
were close to it and yet by the magnitude and universality
of their work, surpassed it: Picasso, for example, who is
the subject of the next to the last chapter. The opening
studies are on the immediate often-acknowledged ances-
tors of surrealism: on Lautréamont, first, whose impor-
tance and influence have been stressed more steadfastly
than those of any other writer; and then, on Rimbaud
and Mallarmé, who have enjoyed much more intermittent
favor with the surrealists than Lautréamont. Of course,
many other names will be evoked and accredited. The sur-
realists were always concerned with discovering in the past,
both near and distant, confirmation for their beliefs and
practices. They demolish their adversaries as vigorously as
they extol spirits kindred to their own. Thus Breton claims
Heraclitus as a surrealist dialectician, and Baudelaire as a
surrealist moralist. Not only do the surrealists traffic fa-
miliarly with such obvious names as Sade, Hegel, Marx,
Freud, Saint-Just, but they also permit entrance into their
chapel, through a side-door perhaps and a bit grudgingly,
to Dante, Shakespeare, Gide.

The term itself of surrealism has already passed through
the period when it was considered a joke, especially by
academic circles and even serious critics who refused to
pay any attention to it. There is still some scoffing at its
expense, but I believe it comes now from those who are
totally uninitiated to art. I spent several days at the Inter-
national Exposition in Paris of 1938, which has been the
biggest show put on by the surrealists to date, and still
remember the tittering and even jeering on the part of
some of the by-standers. And today in the Museum of Mod-
ern Art in New York and in the Art Institute in Chicago
one can witness the same attitude of scepticism and marked
distaste in some of the tourists who turn up there. The
importance and the seriousness of surrealism equal now
the seriousness granted the other two contemporary move-

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